On Thursday, Jaguars coach Doug Marrone brought a folder with him to his usual press conference. “This has the answers that maybe I’m looking for on how we can stop the Patriots,” he said.

Marrone, whose first season as coach has coincided with the Jaguars’ first playoff run in a decade, has received plenty of advice this week on how to defeat the Patriots, who have made it to at least this far in the playoffs in each of the last seven years. Jacksonville executive vice president of football operations Tom Coughlin no doubt offered his opinion, given his two Super Bowl wins over the Patriots as coach of the Giants.

He’s hardly the only one. Everywhere, pundits hoping for a Patriot loss have chimed in. Talk of the Jaguars pulling off an unlikely victory was so pervasive that the Vegas line dropped a full two points in Jacksonville’s favor in a matter of days.

But of all the advice, none was quite like the contents of the folder Marrone held in front of the gathered media. He read from the front cover: “Dear Jags, want to beat the Patriots? Here’s how.”

Was this a mole within the New England locker room? Or a rogue agent of TB12? Alas, no. The source of this manifesto: The first graders at Bolles Elementary.

“Eat lots of chicken,” one student wrote. “Run fast and have fun,” another said. These are more reasonable points than what you might’ve heard from Skip Bayless this week.

A few pieces of advice were actually pretty prescient for kids who weren’t born the last time the Jaguars made the postseason. With so much on the line this week, “Don’t be nervous” is a valuable thing to remember for a team that’s going to be amped up on Sunday. But the most important advice of all for beating New England: “Sack Tom Brady.”

The first-graders at Bolles Elementary are probably more qualified than I am to tell Doug Marrone how his Jaguars can lock up their first Super Bowl bid. Beating the Patriots is much easier said than done, even if Tom Brady has only one working hand. There’s a reason why they’ve dominated the NFL playoffs so thoroughly over the past decade and a half.

But if there’s reason to believe in the Jaguars, it’s this: They bear a striking resemblance to the few teams who have found success against the Patriots in the era of Belichick and Brady. Since 2007, only four teams have beaten the Patriots in the playoffs: the Broncos (twice), the Giants (twice), the Jets, and the Ravens. All have dominant defenses. All refused to let the Patriots dictate the terms of the game.

Here’s a few reasons why the Jaguars are built to potentially join them:

They get to the quarterback with just their front four. Constant blitzing is a fool’s errand against the Patriots, who are better than any team in NFL history at getting the ball out quickly and exploiting defenses that use extra rushers. To beat them, you have to create pressure with just the front four, while committing more defenders to stopping the short passing game.

The Jaguars can do this better than most. Calais Campbell, at 6-foot-8, 300 pounds, is one of the league’s most unstoppable pass rushers, having finished the regular season with 14.5 sacks. He’s joined by Malik Jackson, Yannick Ngakoue, Dante Fowler, and Marcell Dareus to form a front that could cause a lot of issues for New England’s questionable offensive line.

Jacksonville’s cornerbacks dominate in man coverage. Before Antonio Brown’s performance last week, Jacksonville cornerback A.J. Bouye hadn’t given up a single touchdown in man coverage all season. And he’s the No. 2 corner on the Jaguars defense. Bouye and Jalen Ramsey are fully capable of shutting down Brandin Cooks, Chris Hogan, and the rest of the Patriots receivers.

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If they do that, Brady will be relying a lot on his running backs underneath, as well as tight end Rob Gronkowski. Both of those options aren’t exactly ideal for the Jaguars, who have had issues with pass-catching backs and tight ends all year. But at the very least, Jacksonville has two of the fastest and most athletic linebackers in the NFL in Myles Jack (UCLA) and Telvin Smith on its side. With his hand potentially affecting Brady’s precision, they could force him into mistakes.

The Jaguars understand how to control the tempo with the run game. The Jaguars ran the ball 26 more times than any other NFL team this season. In some ways, that strategy was meant to keep the ball out of Blake Bortles’ hands. But from another perspective: It was a genius bit of offensive strategy from Marrone. Control the ball and the pace of the game, and you’re often in a much better place to win.

Leonard Fournette is fully capable of grinding a game away, and in the Patriots’ undersized front seven, he’ll have an enticing matchup in which he can do just that. New England allowed 4.7 yards per carry this season, second-worst in the league. The Jaguars were 2-4 this season when Fournette carried fewer than 20 times and 7-2 when he reached that threshold.

Ryan Kartje is a sports features reporter, with a special focus on the NFL and college sports. He has worked for the Orange County Register since 2012, when he was hired as UCLA beat writer. His enterprise work on the rise and fall of the daily fantasy sports industry (http://www.ocregister.com/articles/industry-689093-fantasy-daily.html) was honored in 2015 with an Associated Press Sports Editors’ enterprise award in the highest circulation category. His writing has also been honored by the Football Writers Association of America and the U.S. Basketball Writers Association. A graduate of the University of Michigan, Ryan worked for the Bloomington (Ind.) Herald-Times and Fox Sports Wisconsin, before moving out west to live by the beach and eat copious amounts of burritos.

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